This week’s video cautions against raising stakes beyond the scope and established conflict of your story.
Video Transcript:
What’s one of the first things any novelist learns? Raise the stakes, right? Think of the worst possible thing that could happen to your character, then make it worse. Losing his job—eh, that’s not so bad. So maybe, after he loses his job, his daughter gets kidnapped. But that’s still not the worst thing that could happen. So maybe his daughter and the President gets kidnapped. Maybe they get kidnapped by brain-sucking aliens in the middle of an apocalyptic snowstorm, with the threat of nuclear war looming on the horizon. Now we’re talking high stakes! Just try to tell me how we could make that one any worse for the character.
But really the question we should be asking ourselves at this point is not, “How can we possibly make this situation any worse?”—but rather, “Should the stakes be this high?” The bare and simple truth is not every story needs to have the stakes ramped to the hilt. Your quiet literary saga is probably not going to benefit from a nuclear holocaust. In fact, not all political thrillers or war stories are going to benefit from a nuclear holocaust if the grandiose scope of the stakes takes the attention away from what really matters: the characters.
If you push your stakes too far beyond the scope and the established conflict of your story, you’re likely to end up with either a series of events that don’t make linear sense, or a series of events that are going to spiral into ridiculous melodrama. Never discount subtlety, even in the high-tension excitement of dangerous and adventurous stories. Keep in mind the arc you’re trying to create for your characters. Some characters may need to endure a nuclear holocaust in order to learn their lessons and change their ways. But sometimes the catalyst a story needs—i.e., the “worst” thing that can happen to a character—is something much smaller and more intimate.
Photo Credit
Thumbnail – Screen Capture From Video
Originally published on Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors
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- How to Figure Out the Worst Thing That Can Happen to Your Character
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